MAMMALS. 



THE mammals of these islands are surpassed in poverty 

 only by the reptiles. New Zealand is the only land, ex- 

 Poverty of cepting perhaps the Polar regions, of consider- 

 literature on able size with a poorer list of four-footed in- 

 cur mammals, habitants ; and, compared with the doubtful 

 rat and various bats of that region, our quadrupeds make 

 quite a formidable list. They have failed, however, to 

 arouse that interest that has ever attached to our birds, 

 fishes, and insects, as witness the literature of the subject. 

 There are not many more than half-a-dozen works of any 

 standing, as against over two hundred treating of our 

 birds. For this lack of interest in the quadrupeds many 

 reasons might be assigned, but none operates perhaps more 

 powerfully than the great difficulty of observing them, 

 second only to that of studying living fishes. Birds live 

 under our eyes : they are, with few exceptions, creatures of 

 daylight, and we can watch them obtaining their food 

 and rearing their young. Our beasts are, with equally few 

 exceptions, creatures of twilight and darkness, 



are careful to keep far from the haunts of man. 

 How far this love of darkness is natural, and how far it is 

 the result of a proper appreciation of man's peculiarities, 

 who shall say ? The fact remains ; and the discomfort, 

 often impossibility, of nocturnal excursions has, I think, 



